Novell appears to be attempting to cut off SCO's lifeline to its cash reserves. By not focusing on the arguments over who owns what in Unix but instead hammering on the far more simple matter of SCO not living up to its business contract, Novell hopes to put a quick end to SCO and its seemingly endless Linux litigation.

"""That's not true, as this one was formerly known as Caldera. Caldera were really good guys. Ask at Erlangen University about them for example.

Nobody knows what changed them """

Well, in all fairness, SCO, the *original* SCO was a good company with a good product... except that it really started falling behind, and then they got all focused on UnixWare, and then Linux started eating their market, and they started working on Tarantella and sold their OS division to Caldera. (And I think Tarrantella is doing OK. Anyone know? Didn't Sun buy it or something?)

Caldera was a decent Linux company with a proprietary streak. Whenever they needed something for their distro and it wasn't available as OSS, Caldera's first impusle was to look for something proprietary they could license.

Contrast that with RedHat. It's true that early on, they did resell things like Applixware. But they stopped that a ***long*** time ago. When they needed something for their distro and it wasn't available as OSS, they either started a project, or joined an existing one.

Ransom Love, CEO of Caldera, made some unpopular statments. (Particularly saying that sometimes GPL licensing was better and sometimes BSD licensing was better.) He was a figure that the community loved to hate.

Anyway, during that period, with buying power that no one would have believed except in the dot.com days, when buyfreshclamsonline.com was a *real* domain name, Cadera bought SCO.

One day, Ransom and his crew found themselves ousted, without much public explanation. And the new crew, headed by Dear Darl, took charge.

I sometimes wonder what might have been possible if Old SCO had decided to hang in and ride the wave. Or if Ransom, and his unpopular, but not beyond the pale, strategies had been implemented.

But that was not to be.

Darl got put in charge, to carry out... well... the plans he was put in charge to carry out, and sadly, that is what newer Linux users think that the grand old name of SCO represents.

I despise the current SCO as much as anyone. I take a sort of petty delight when their stock price takes a dive.

But I also recognize that Old SCO kept the Unix on PC's concept alive until Linux was ready... or even existed for that matter.